Path, the private social network, Passes 10 Million Registered Users

At around 1:15 PM EST on Monday, Path announced it had surpassed the 10 million registered user mark. Path CEO Dave Morin revealed the new figure on Path (of course), along with an image of a counter at 10,000,006 simply titled “Users” at the top.

If you look closely, the image seems to be showing a picture of a browser that is displaying an internal website used by the team to track the figure:

For reference, Path passed 2 million users in February 2012 about two months after relaunching its app. It hit 3 million users in June 2012, meaning it added about 1 million users in four months.

Between then and now, the service has added 7 million users in about 10 months. Yet the real growth acceleration has only begun, according to Morin, who recently said 1 million users are joining per week. In other words, the 10 million mark is just a small part of a bigger story.

Like the last growth spurt to pass the 2 million mark, this one seems to be centered on a new version of the app. In March, Path released version 3.0,featuring messaging support. This was closely followed by the addition of the search feature in December.

All of this combined led to people from all around the world inviting their friends to Path, and thus growth in new markets such as Venezuela, Spanish-speaking populations like Central America and Columbia, Mexico, the Caribbean, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and then the Spanish-speaking population of the US. “We’ll usually see intense growth and then it moves on to another country,” Morin told the WSJ.

It’s important to emphasize that registered users aren’t all active users for long. Even if it’s adding 1 million users weekly, the real test for Path will be to see if it can retain a solid subset of them (and find a real revenue stream).